diversity

There’s a lot of support out there for women, such as in women’s networks, coaching and mentoring. Some people believe that these networks are needed as women are more insecure and need to be propped up. They believe that perhaps women can’t cope by themselves. Perhaps that is even what you think. Perhaps you think you are better off networking with men.

It’s especially hard to network with women as some of these women’s groups are made fun of by the guys too. It sort of scares them, all these women, and they say something about ‘gossiping’ and roll their eyes.

But, think about it. Many women do like to vent and feel that someone else really understands. Is that really bad? Many women do love gossiping. Should we stop doing it? Should we just grow up and be serious and professional?

No! The opposite is true. We need our girlfriends, they are essential for our health, well-being and career success. Let me show you why, and how you can make it work for you to help your career.

Girlfriends are essential – they keep us stable, healthy and confident

Personally, I never gave my girlfriends, networks and gossip a second thought. I love it, so what if I am being made fun of?

However I changed my mind after reading this fantastic article by Bonnie Marcus published here. Bonnie, the founder of the site, and a successful business coach, quotes the head of psychiatry at Stanford, and it instantly hit a nerve with me.

He says:

Women connect with each other differently and provide support systems that help each other to deal with stress and difficult life experiences. Physically this quality “girlfriend time” helps us to create more serotonin–a neurotransmitter that helps combat depression and can create a general feeling of well being.

Women share feelings whereas men often form relationships around activities. They rarely sit down with a buddy and talk about how they feel about certain things or how their personal lives are going. Jobs? Yes. Sports? Yes. Cars? Yes. Fishing, hunting, golf? Yes. But their feelings?–rarely.

Women do it all of the time. We share from our souls with our sisters, and evidently that is very good for our health. He said that spending time with a friend is just as important to our general health as jogging or working out at a gym.

He explained that one of the best things that a man could do for his health is to be married to a woman whereas for a woman, one of the best things she could do for her health was to nurture her relationships with her girlfriends. At first everyone laughed, but he was serious.

After reading this, I realised how essential my female friends are for me. How spending time with them is not wasting my time, but is a form of exercise. When we exercise we are doing something that’s good for our bodies, and it’s the same when we are hanging out with female friends.

So I started doing it more deliberately, and it has hugely boosted my confidence and creativity.

Building your circle of girlfriends to help your career

So what does this mean for you? What do you need to do and, more importantly, what can you do to make it work for your career?

1. Make sure you vent, gossip and share your feelings in a safe place

Yes, you do need to vent gossip, and share your feelings, no need to be ashamed of it, it’s for your health and it helps you feel secure. But keep it to yourself, and be careful not to do it in the office. You wouldn’t do a fitness work-out in the office would you? There’s a time and a place for everything.

This advice particularly applies if you work in a male-dominated industry. Similarly it applies if you work at – or aspire to work at – a more senior level, dominated by males. So do remember that the first thing you need to do is to find a safe place before sharing your feelings.

2. Consciously build a support system

Perhaps you have a good group of friends, which is great, but you want to check if they can really help with your career. If you find this is not the case, you need to start building your own support system. You could join a women’s network, just try a few and see which one resonates with you.

If you can’t find the support you like. Then just start your own network or LinkedIn Group. Or, if you are more of a 1-to-1 person, why not organise a monthly chat over lunch with a peer, a ‘sparring partner’. Or look for a more formal way to create similar support. A coach can have this role, or a mentor.

3. Don’t be afraid to chat and share while networking with women

Networking groups are often seen as a place to build business contacts, and eventually sell. Yes, this is indeed what you need to do while out networking.

But a networking group that you visit regularly can also become a great place to find support. A place where you can find someone who listens, someone that recognises your issues, and helps you feel motivated and inspired. Don’t worry about it and do make sure there is time and space for you mental work-out!

4. Remember, network for your career too, with men!

So yes, it is good to network for support, but you also need to network for career opportunities. It can be helpful to find a sponsor or mentor who can help you with that, join a business network or go for a role as a governor or non executive director.

For this sort of networking you do not have to turn to other women. You need someone that can connect you with the right people or opportunities, someone that will champion your cause and help you get ahead. Men might even be better placed for that, as they often have a different or wider network.

Where to start?

Your first step, is to find a few minutes to reflect. Check in with yourself and ask ‘Do I feel supported?’ Perhaps you regularly feel frustrated, with no place to go. Or perhaps you bore your partner with work feelings, or worse even, burst out in slightly inappropriate rants to random colleagues. Then it’s time to look for further support and start building your network of female supporters.

[Published by WiC on behalf of Inge Woudstra of W2O Consulting and Training]

Can the legal sector offer women roles that ease the pain of managing work and childcare? Totum knows, and works with, the firms that are forging ahead in supporting female talent.

A BBC Radio 4 programme ‘You and Yours’ recently put UK childcare costs under the spotlight once again. Many parents welcomed the introduction of 30-hours’ free childcare for their three and four-year-olds – a rise from the previous 15 hours. But, as this feature showed, these offerings never come without complications. On one hand nurseries have complained that they cannot afford to cover their costs under new funding levels, while on the other, parents of younger children worry that additional costs will be passed onto them through higher fees.

For all parents, it’s another reminder of the difficult juggle faced in returning to work after having children. For many (typically mothers) the rise of flexible and part-time work has been a God-send allowing some room for manoeuvre to balance work and childcare. But as this programme showed, it remains for many a difficult financial balance: returning to work is critical to maintain the family income but pointless if wiped out by childcare costs.

Some parents return to work knowing that any income will be flatlined by nursery fees. They are effectively working for nothing. But they do so for the long-term payback of remaining in work and progressing their careers as best they can through these early years.

But this is a fact that can still be lost on employers and colleagues who do not face the childcare juggle. There can still be an obstacle to offering good part-time and flexible work – an inability to see how a job can be done differently as well as a view that such employees are ‘less committed’ than their full-time counterparts. The need to strictly leave the office on time to collect a child from nursery can still be frowned upon by those who can stay after hours.

Given what many women go through to get back to work after having children, however, it seems deeply unfair to stereotype them with a lack of commitment. If they have an employer that understands and supports their return to work with decently paid, flexible contracts, mothers will also likely offer loyalty and a keen motivation to get the job done well in the time given. They have a lot to lose if they don’t.

That is why at Totum we are delighted to be working with more law firms that understand the benefits of retaining female talent after having children. In recent years, many firms have launched programmes to support mothers returning to work after maternity leave. Meanwhile, and perhaps more importantly, we are seeing more flexible and part-time business services roles come into law. Current opportunities we are working on at Totum include a three-day job share as a BD and Marketing Project Manager, plus part-time COO and Finance Director roles. Flexible options at these most senior levels of law are a sign of changing culture – a belief that things can indeed be done differently.

This is great news for all parents, but particularly mums who still typically face the childcare juggle. Nursery costs are never going to go away – the financial and logistical balancing act goes on. But with more employers – including law firms – offering a way for parents to manage childcare alongside interesting and career-progressing work, the struggle may become easier. And the bonus is that employers get to retain the talent that promotes business growth. A win-win in our book.

If you would like to know more about Totum’s flexible and full-time roles in the legal sector, please contact Deborah.Gray@TotumPartners.com

The confidence gap between men and women is a myth, according to Laura Guillén, Professor of Organisational Behaviour at ESMT Berlin, because women viewed as self-confident aren’t more likely to get ahead.

For women, gaining influence at work is more closely tied to their warmth and caring than the appearance of self-confidence.

Laura’s research, in collaboration with Margarita May of IE Business School and Natalia Karelaia of INSEAD, examined high-performing workers in a male-dominated technology company that employs more than 4,000 people worldwide.

Laura says:

Despite there being no visible confidence gap in the way high-performing men and women rated themselves, their reasons for gaining influence in the company showed a sharp gender disparity. Although men viewed as self-confident were more likely to get ahead, our research demonstrated that this was not the case for women, who were judged on their warmth, or how caring and social they seemed.

This means that popular messaging about how women must change themselves to appear more self-confident in order to be successful isn’t just false, but also dampens the gender-diversity of the workforce. It ignores that the responsibility of nurturing this diversity should fall with employers and places the onus on the female employees themselves to conform with lazy, masculine stereotypes.

The research suggests women are expected to care for others on top of their workload, whilst men are held to a lower standard of key performance indicators.

Laura continues:

In order to get ahead, women are having to care for others whilst their male counterparts focus on their own objectives. Despite this prosocial quality not being listed on any job description, it appears to be the key performance indicator against which access, power and influence is granted to successful women.

In order to combat this, HR departments should make sure that women and men are being evaluated against the same criteria in the hiring process and when being selected for promotions. Performance appraisals often contain nearly twice the amount of language about being warm for women than for men. These unconscious gender biases must be confronted so that talents and skills across organisations are rewarded fairly, regardless of gender.

For some time, Totum has seen more women making headway at leadership levels in business services functions in law. But we are delighted to now be able to put some figures behind what we know from our experience of working with talented business women in the legal sector. These show that more women are being shortlisted and placed at law firms, and in more senior roles.

At Totum, we focus on business services teams in law. This includes roles across all levels of seniority in BD & marketing, HR, IT and finance functions, as well as other cross-functional roles in areas like project and process management, innovation and change. A fair bit of our work and time is spent on ‘retained’ projects – this is where a law firm exclusively selects Totum to work on a particular role or roles. These projects are conducted on a retained basis, because they tend to be more complex and difficult to source – they are generally, therefore, more senior.

Our findings

We conducted research into the retained projects we’ve worked on over the past three years – since 2015. In this time, our retained work distribution split across roles as follows: Director (45%), Head of (28%), COO/CEO/CFO type roles (20%), Manager (5%) and Executive (2%). As you can see, retained projects tend to favour more leadership roles.

But what is really interesting is how many women are now getting shortlisted and placed in these jobs. We already knew from our diversity statistics that we enjoy an equal gender balance among our candidates, if not slightly weighted towards women, with 56% female and 44% male candidates in 2017. But this research has found the numbers of women rising in our retained work too. So, while in 2015/16, only 23% of shortlisted candidates for retained roles were women, in 2016/17 this figure rose to 44% and for 2017/18, it was up again by three percentage points to 47%. Nearly even-stevens with men.

Not only that but more women are also being placed in these roles. Back in 2015/16, we had a 70:30 ratio of men getting placed in these positions compared to women; this flipped to a 43:57 ratio in favour of women in 2016/7, and we now have a perfect 50:50 balance in 2017/18. This is fantastic news and something to be celebrated.

Role modelling the future

A great example of women getting ahead in law is Sadia Baron, Chief Marketing Officer at Reed Smith, who is also featured as a case study on our leadership microsite (www.totumleadership.com). She joined Reed Smith in 2013 as Director of Marketing, EMEA, but before long she had taken on a second job as well – as Director of the BD function for the firm’s Business and Finance function. When she became CMO in September 2016, it was the logical culmination of her huge input over the past three years. But it was also an example of how doors are increasingly opening to talented women who want to make an impact at the highest levels of this fast-changing profession.

Yes, we know we have some way to go yet. Women lawyers still lag behind men in achieving partnership in the legal profession. And law firms still need to work on delivering the kind of workplace flexibility that women often need to stay within the profession, and to advance and work at the highest levels – and that goes for business services professionals and lawyers.

But things are changing – and in business services functions, particularly fast. We are delighted to have been able to work with so many talented women who are taking the lead and changing the legal sector from within.

If you would like more information on Totum please visit our website where you will also find a number of roles at all levels.

The exit interview is a dying breed at a time when so many questions are being asked about how to retain the best talent, how to increase diversity at all levels in organisations and how to engage the younger generations just entering the job market with a different set of expectations and approaches.

So much of the people management in organisations is now being delivered electronically which takes out a crucial opportunity to really understand what makes people stay in your organisation – and why do they leave.

When this is applied to women, it is particularly important, as during their tenure many women fear calling out any potential discriminatory practices or behaviours for fear of staining their reputation in their industry. This leads organisations down a slippery path – your women leave the organisation and you may never find out why, yet you can almost guarantee that those reasons will come out eventually and if they contain any kind of misogyny or sexism, the reputation of your organisation can get tarnished before you even know it is happening.

The power of movements such as #TimesUp originate from women’s frustration at not having a supportive platform to communicate the behaviour and treatment that they have been exposed to. When given that opportunity, it is clear that there are deep seated and embedded discriminatory practices that go unchallenged and these only come to light by providing a safe supportive environment where women feel that what they say will be used positively and most critically – acted upon.

If you are leaving an organisation, leaving the industry entirely, or maybe stopping any economic activity, it is still vital that you feel heard about your experiences there, and that may not happen through the standard leaver processes followed by so many businesses.

If your business no longer uses exit interviews, maybe believing that there was nothing of value in them, then your process wasn’t asking the right questions, or interpreting the answers correctly. Instead there is a missed opportunity in the lack of analysis of valuable data that may contain the secret to attracting and retaining a talented pool of women critical to your business’ future success.

Stay engaged until the very last minute with each employee and learn how to get better at making them not want to leave.